the colors of emotion¹

Abstract

Research on synesthesia has consistently found an association between colors and emotions. In order to try to determine whether the basis for this phenomenon is culture specific or universal, a test to determine color and emotion associations was administered to a sample of Tzeltal‐speaking adults from highland Chiapas and U.S. college undergraduates. The results of the color‐emotion test indicate that within the limits of translation equivalence color chips and emotion terms show very similar patterns of association in both cultures. These results seem to indicate that the phenomenon of synesthesia is mediated by the universal factors uncovered by Osgood's semantic differential test. The results also indicate that saturation is a major factor in color‐emotion synesthesia.